BFD

This from TexGov Greg Abbott:

Well excuse me if I don’t turn a few cartwheels and stuff.  Fifty years ago, you could see liquor stores’ delivery scooters putting around all over every city and town in South Africa, painted in the various stores’ livery.

And, just so everyone understands my scorn, you could order beer and wine for home delivery.  Also gin, vodka, brandy, Scotch and rum.  Fifty years ago.  In South Africa.

I once noted that as one moves south from the northern states in the U.S., the gun laws become less stupid, and the liquor laws become more so.  In Chicago, I could buy single-malt Scotch at the supermarket, but I couldn’t buy a gun anywhere.  Down here, even oh-so-cosmopolitan Plano became a “liquor” retail area (as opposed to just beer & wine) only about five years ago, but I have about fifteen gun stores within a couple miles of my house.

There are a lot of things to like about the South, but their liquor laws are not among them.

So:  wake me up when I can order my favorite Scotch and gin from Total Wines or Spec’s, and have them delivered to my front door.

Actually, check that.  Wake me up when I can buy my booze from Amazon.  Like you can in Britain (where you can’t buy anything made by Colt).

And one last thing:  I don’t enjoy the paternalistic tone of government “allowing” me to do anything, and being advised to do something “responsibly“.  Fuck you, fuck your responsibility, and thanks for nothing, you paternalistic asshole.

Now send the Texas State Guard down to police the Rio Grande, and stop pissing around with chickenshit like this.

Road Destruction Season

If anyone is planning a road trip in Britishland over the next 3-4 years, be warned that the Brits have released their planned scheme of major roads to be affected by construction, improvements, closures etc.  Here’s the map:

It’s been a while since I looked at a U.K. roadmap… but isn’t that map essentially ALL the major roads in Britishland?

Looks like the M6 is going to be cataclysmic;  however, as said highway leads to both Liverpool and  Glasgow, I can’t see why this would be a problem for all right-thinking drivers.

No man should.

Getting Attacked

I see this:

A man suffering from acute Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) went on an anti-Trump rampage at the sight of Trump supporters at a rally in Los Angeles on Sunday. The unidentified man, who was later arrested, was so enraged at the sight of the MAGA hat-clad rallygoers that he parked his car in the middle of the street and charged them. The man’s shocked family watched from the car as he assaulted and spat on the Trump supporters.

…and I can’t help but think that if anyone spat in my face in the street, his next spit would contain a lot  of blood.

And yes, that also applies to this action:

Trump supporter is viciously attacked and doused in milkshake by America-hating activists yelling ‘Nazi scum’ outside Parliament minutes after Corbyn’s speech.

I note that in the above incident, the police just stood and watched.  I bet that if I’d floored a couple of those milkshake tossers [sic], the fuzz would be there like a flash to arrest me, however.

I don’t care.  It’s time we put an end to this shit.  The Left is always preaching violence, and some day soon they’re going to find out exactly  what it’s like.

Not Known At This Address

A little while ago, Reader Sam D. had this thought about Amazon’s Alexa:

“Why would anyone WANT his own personal Stasi agent in his home, AND be paying for it?”

Indeed.  Somebody remind me again why I’m not wired into the Internet Of Things:

If you’re a Google user, you probably noticed some trouble last night when trying to access Google-owned services. Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google’s sites and services–including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube–were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
However, the Google Cloud outage also affected third-party apps and services that use Google Cloud space for hosting. Affected third-party apps and services include Discord, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iCloud services.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud’s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.

Don’t think you can escape this bullshit by jumping in your car and getting out of town, either:

Governments are collecting lots of data on the people using roads, trains and buses, and without proper oversight, that information could easily be misused.

(I’ve often wondered, by the way, if my movements are being studied by way of my phone location software.  As I drive for Uber, I bet it’s interesting reading:  “He goes to the airport three or four times a day and never seems to drive back… WTF?”)  And speaking of which:

I wonder why they bother to warn us anymore.

And then there’s this:

Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.

What I’d like to do is hack into this system, and publish a Wanking Hard Incidence Ranking Report (WHIRR!) for every member of Congress.

Maybe then someone  would take this loss of privacy thing seriously.

The Problem With Bread

All my life, I’ve loved bread.  As a kid I ate bread with every meal, mostly the commercial white- or brown loaves (called “government bread” in South Africa because the price was kept low by a combination of both subsidy and quota production).  The nearest equivalent today would be the Wonderbread/ Hostess/ generic breads found in supermarkets (U.K. equivalent:  Hovis/ Warburtons/ store brands).

Gradually as I got older and my taste buds matured, I discovered bakery breads, my taste for which became exacerbated by visits to Europe and exposure to wares of the boulangerie  and bäckerei… oy, my mouth waters just thinking  about the Viennese brötchen  I’d gobble down with my morning coffee.

All went well, until my doctor told me that I needed to change my diet (his exact words:  “If you don’t lose weight, you’re going to die, you fat bastard”).  There were other words related to my extreme paucity of exercise (“Get up off your fat ass and start exercising, too.”)

I know that diets don’t work;  only permanent changes in lifestyle and eating habits do.  And the only change that seems to work without being too much work is getting rid of the bad things which cause you to gain weight, chief offenders being starches (grains) and sugars.

Sugars were not too difficult, as long as I cut out stuff like Coke and fruit jams [moan];  but I was never going to eliminate sugar from my diet altogether because I can’t drink coffee without at least a little sugar to cut the bitterness — and I’ll never  give up coffee.

The grains were not altogether difficult to cut back on.  I’ve never cared much for pasta — whatever it’s called, it’s all the same stuff — so Italian dishes like lasagna and macaroni went into the trashcan.  Ditto rice, which I’ve always liked but found easy to drop.

But then comes the worst offender:  bread.  Oh… fuck.  Wait:  you mean no more baguettes?

Non.

What about challah?

Nah.

Croissants?

Pas du tout.

Brötchen?

Bestimmt nicht.

So my all-time favorite, crusty French batard loaf?

Mais non (mon gros cochon).

As I said… fuck.

So here’s what I do.  I limit myself to two slices of toast (or one croissant) on Saturday mornings, and occasionally a toasted sandwich (cheese, or chicken mayonnaise) on Friday nights.  Those are my “cheats” (without which I’d never do any of it).

And I hit the gym — treadmill and stationary bicycle for half an hour — every weekday, religiously.  (When I was still at Doc Russia’s house, I walked about two miles per day, including a quarter-mile up and down Thrombosis Hill*.)  The results have been quite pleasing:  270 lbs in Jan 2017, somewhat south of 230 lbs today, with a goal weight of 205, which was my weight at age 23 in the Army, right after boot camp.  (Some asswipe once suggested that at my height, my goal should be 175, whereupon I chastised him sorely, saying that I hadn’t weighed 175 since 1969 at age 15.  When he got his breath back, he agreed.)

But I still miss — I mean, constantly — my daily bread.  Were it not for that “death” bullshit, I’d dump the whole stupid diet/ fitness lark in an instant and go back to my four slices a day.  I mean, FFS:


*the road up the hill behind Doc’s house, which requires cars to shift into low gear at the base.

A Gun WTF

This in my email yesterday from one of the Usual Suspects:

Am I the only one who goes “WTF?” — and the price is only part of the issue.  Let me count the ways:

  • Fugly finish
  • Aluminum grips
  • That stupid extruded grip safety thing
  • A gun called “We The People” from a German  company.

Other than all that, it’s not bad (apart from the price).